


After

by wendymarlowe



Category: Ender Series - Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Spoilers for ending of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 16:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8379466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendymarlowe/pseuds/wendymarlowe
Summary: Ender and Bean have a midnight heart-to-heart.(Written for coricomile for Yuletide 2016)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coricomile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coricomile/gifts).



> This takes place after the climax of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, so spoiler alert for those books if you haven't read them already. Coricomile, I hope this fits the kind of G-rated sharing-a-bed fic you wanted :-)

“Ender?”

There was a soft huff in the darkness, then the sound of Ender rolling over as he reached to turn on the lamp beside his bed. “Bean,” he said, his voice thick with sleep.

“Not out celebrating with everyone else?”

Ender flopped back onto his pillow and flung his arm over his eyes. “They’ll hate themselves for it later.”

“Yeah.” Bean seated himself cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the small room. He was tall enough now for his eye level to be even with Ender’s, even though Ender’s bed was the usual height from the floor. It only looked odd, he realized, because the curvature of the tunnels the buggers had dug out was causing him to recalibrate his expectation of ergonomics. Everything on the asteroid was too low, too wide, too _other_ to be fully comfortable to humans, and human standards fit poorly within the tunnels’ measurements. Now for the first time in his life, Bean was something approaching a normal human size (for a child, anyway) and yet.

And yet.

There was nothing “normal” about him, was there?

“Did you know?” Ender asked abruptly. “I realized they were keeping us separated, and I assumed . . . did you know?”

“By the end, yes. I figured it out.”

“I should have.” Ender rolled to his side so their faces were barely a yard apart in the dim light. His eyes were red, Bean realized. He’d been crying in his sleep. That last fight was supposed to have been Ender’s chance to escape, to prove himself too cruel for their war games, and instead they lauded him for it. The transmissions Bean and Graff had spent the last few days reading while they waited for the Polemarch’s men to surrender indicated that everyone on Earth who wasn’t currently shooting each other was celebrating. “Everything else was so carefully scripted,” Ender said quietly, “but I let myself believe that the adults were making this last, gigantic mistake. That they had become so enamored with the idea of wunderkind fighting their war for them that they forgot we’re still young and have the endurance of children. I thought . . .”

“You wanted to prove them wrong by failing.”

“I failed in a worse way than they can understand, and they don’t realize it yet.”

Bean didn’t try to contradict him. For the adults - for everyone on Earth - the buggers were the big scary _other_ who threatened to wipe out humanity. No one seemed to have any trouble condoning xenocide when the species being slaughtered was rendered to a mere stereotype of evil by every news account, every vid, every story. When the panic of their initial invasion was still fresh in the older generation’s minds.

For the current generation, though, the buggers were no more than a distant fairytale - multiples of their lifetimes ago, for the younger battle school students. They were less a threat than the Polemarch’s armies, the Achilles of the world, the adults who would no doubt spend the rest of their lives fighting over plots of land on an insignificant rock orbiting an insignificant star which was, now, not the only human habitation in the universe. Every bugger on every planet dead, the reports had said. The remains of every human invading force were now colonizers.

“You can leave now,” Bean said, after several minutes of silence. “They’ll want to fight over you, but-”

“-But I can’t go back. I know.”

“You don’t have to. You can go forward.” The thread of an idea spooled out ahead of him, consequences of consequences trailing off into the virtual distance. “How long do you think it will take for them to understand? A hundred years? A thousand? How far out among the stars do you think the human race will reach by the time humanity comes around to acknowledge the sacrifice it asked of you? And how fast do you think we’ll be traveling by the time we get there?”

Ender blinked a few times, then sat up. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and Bean could practically read Ender’s recent lack of sleep in the shadows thrown by each individual rib. “Would you come with me?” he asked.

Bean scrambled up to sit at the other end of the bed. Ender was still taller, but not by anywhere near as much as he’d been even several months earlier when they were in Dragon Army. For the first time, they might be mistaken for actual peers. “Would you want me to?”

Ender bit his lip. “If you like,” he finally said.

 _Earth is for humanity. Human life, human wars, human grievances._ Bean looked down at his too-small body, now not as small as it had once been. _Human._ He was close enough to pass, but did Anton’s key change things _enough?_ Did it count? _Is it self-xenocide if I stay, or if I go?_

“Lots of room in space,” Ender said in response to Bean’s lack of answer. “Plenty of room to grow into your own person.”

“It’s growing I’m afraid of.”

Ender shook his head. “No it’s not. It’s the ‘person’ part you’re uncomfortable with.”

“Graff told you?”

 _“Cale-te.”_ Ender rolled his eyes and slid back under the covers, his toes digging into Bean’s thigh. “You know better than that. Get in here. And turn out the light.”

Now it was Bean’s turn to sit blankly for a moment. “You want me to stay?”

“I slaughtered an entire fucking species so I could get some sleep, Bean.” He almost, but not quite, managed to make it sound light-hearted. “Don’t be an idiot. There’s space.”

Bean carefully maneuvered himself around so he was lying half-spooned behind Ender. His arms were long enough now to reach the light without him having to get back up. They’d shared a bed together once, back at battle school, but that had been different. Then they’d been two kids, exhausted, stressed, Ender ready to crumble under the pressure. They’d stayed up late talking in Ender’s bedroom and Bean had fallen asleep at the foot of Ender’s bed. Now they were still exhausted, still stressed, still up late talking . . . but no longer children. _No longer human?_

“You’re human enough to give off body heat,” Ender murmured, displaying that insight which made him such a beloved commander and which Bean could never quite figure out how to emulate. “You’re human enough to be here busting your _zhopa_ along with the rest of us, who were all here because we weren’t human enough to start with. Not compared to everyone down there.” He gestured vaguely, more a rustle than a visual cue in the dark, in what Bean assumed was supposed to be the direction of Earth. “You want to go back and save the human race from itself, you get honorary membership. I get to become the living symbol of what humanity hates most and live my life in exile.” He yawned audibly. “In the meantime, though, _cale-te_ and get some sleep. Save your crisis for later.”

Bean lay silently in the darkness, listening as Ender’s breathing tapered off into a slow, rhythmic refrain.


End file.
